Here at Noble Samurai we take great pride in providing a high standard of service to our customers through our quality, well maintained products…

Since rolling out our very first rank tracking service 8 years ago in 2008 Rank Tracker has tracked the rankings for more than 143,572 users, has been built and then rebuilt from the ground-up 3 times, currently consisting of over 42,002 lines of custom code, and more than 347 live updates to the system (which is a new version every 8.4 Days – pretty nuts!).

However, tracking rankings accurately at scale is a highly complex, resource intensive task, and has been getting harder and harder to do consistently…

In addition to this underlying complexity, the SEO landscape has changed drastically over the last 12 months, with the big search engines such as Google not only getting smarter at predicting what users are searching for, but also at blocking specific SEO methods from working like they once used to.

One such change has been a crackdown by Google on automated queries like the ones used to gather Rank Tracker data. As a result of this, our data provider has been struggling to provide us reliable ranking data for Rank Tracker for some time, which has caused intermittent outages and problems with Rank Tracker updates over the last couple of months.

This has caused delays in Rank Tracker updating for a number of users. Despite numerous attempts to work around the Google restrictions, our data provider is still struggling to keep up with the demand.

We understand how frustrating this might be for you, it has been for us too. However, as a consequence of this decline in data quality and consistency for all our customers, we are now unable to uphold the level of service you deserve, and pay for in Rank Tracker.

And we feel the only honest cause of action is to retire it. Making this decision has been extremely tough, and one we haven’t made easily or hastily.

As Rank Tracker has been one of our flagship products it’s had a significant contribution to our bottom line, so its retirement will be a great loss to us as well.

This may come as a surprise to some users who rely on Rank Tracker for their businesses, but the good news is we’re not turning it off straight away, and we’ve put together a plan to help you make the transition to another service.

Here’s how it’s going to work…

To help you with the transition, Rank Tracker will remain active until 30/08/2016, so you’ll have enough time to make the transition to another Rank Tracker service. All paid subscriptions will be canceled within the next 7 days, so no one will be paying for the last month of the service. If you’d prefer to cancel it now you can do so by following these instructions.

Two things you need to do:

The first thing you’ll want to do is export your keywords and domains from Rank Tracker, so that you can import them into another Rank Tracker service. We’ve put together this video to show you how to export your keywords and domains.

Below you’ll find a few Rank Tracking services which we believe are some of the best options available right now. We’d recommend taking a look at them (and any others you may have heard of) to find a new service to meet your needs.

RankScannerFor anyone currently on the Free white belt plan, RankScanner is a good alternative as they too have a free plan (and higher paid plans if you’re a power user). You can even get additional free keywords by simply tweeting about them and referring friends

MozIf you’re one of our higher plan subscribers, then a Moz Pro subscription might be a good option for you – they even have a free 30 day trial!

SEO PowerSuiteSEO Powersuite also offer a free trial licence, with higher volume licences available (which include a PDF reporting service)

To all of our users who’ve used Rank Tracker over the years we want to say an enormous thank you, it’s been a wild ride, and we hope that you found it a useful tool in your SEO toolkit.

If there is one silver lining in letting Rank Tracker go, it’s that it will free up resources allowing us to pour the same love and focus into our latest product Content Samurai, and continue to provide the same quality of service you’ve come to expect from the Noble Samurai brand.

If you have any questions or queries, or you need help exporting your Rank Tracker keywords, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly support team here.